There are rice paddies surrounding the capital city of Sacramento.
Why do we keep asking residents to sacrifice for even trivial pleasurers like swimming, when it makes no difference at all?
Believe it or not but the area where they grow rice in Sacramento is actually a flood plain. [1] Given your handle maybe you knew that? Surprisingly rice's water needs aren't all that high either. It's not the lowest but it's not the worst by a long shot. [2]
[1] https://www.ppic.org/blog/the-yolo-bypass-its-a-floodplain-i...
[2] https://localwiki.org/davis/Rice_Paddies
"In an arid state with growing pressures on water availability and use, it may surprise many to learn that rice is one of our most water-wise crops, requiring 25 gallons to produce each serving, like oranges, while almonds require 80 gallons per serving"
Rice paddies don't consume lots of water (flooding rice improves yield, but the rice doesn't consume most of the water, it's still available for downstream uses.)
> Why do we keep asking residents to sacrifice for even trivial pleasurers like swimming, when it makes no difference at all?
Because if you cut agricultural use, and thereby the tax base, residents will have to make sacrifices, too.
> The federal government said Wednesday that it won’t deliver water to farmers in California’s agricultural belt, which produces roughly a quarter of the nation’s food, due to the extreme water shortages that are expected to deepen if the direly dry conditions continue through March. [0]
HN is throttling me, so I'll put this here. the CVP is the largest in the country.
> In a normal year the CVP delivers about 7 million acre-feet of water for agricultural, urban, and wildlife use. [1]
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/23/rain-califor... [1]: https://www.watereducation.org/aquapedia/central-valley-proj...
My hunch is that this is a small fraction of the amount of water farms use.
There are a lot of articles like this that make it sound like farms are really hit hard and having to endure sacrifices. There was one from a few months back talking about farmers that had to destroy a bunch of almond trees they couldn't afford to water anymore. About 400 acres worth. There was a dramatic photo of a farmer standing next to a bunch of uprooted trees. Reality: there are 1.6 million acres of almonds in California. Pulling up 400 acres is nothing.
> In an average year, about 39% of California's water consumption, or 34.1 million acre-feet (42.1 km3), is used for agricultural purposes. Of that total, 11%, or 8.9 million acre-feet (11.0 km3) is not consumed by the farms for crop production but is instead recycled and reused by other water users, including environmental use, urban use, and agricultural use, yielding net water consumption for food and fiber production equal to 28% of California's water consumption, or 25.2 million acre-feet (31.1 km3). [0]
The 80% figure is false.
> In a normal year the CVP delivers about 7 million acre-feet of water for agricultural, urban, and wildlife use. [1]
Suffice to say the CVP supplies a significant portion of California's water. It is the largest such project in the country.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Agricultur... [1]: https://www.watereducation.org/aquapedia/central-valley-proj...
> Water use in California is divided into approximately 51% for environmental uses, 39% agricultural use and 11% urban uses, though that varies considerably between regions and between wet and dry years. Solely relying on these statewide volumes is controversial because they don't consider the fact that most of the volume of water used for environmental purposes includes flows down Wild and Scenic Rivers in the North Coast where there is no practical way to recover it for either agricultural or urban use because it lacks many connections to the statewide water supply system. It also doesn't factor in the amount of water required to keep salty water from the Pacific Ocean from intruding into the Delta beyond a certain small concentration.
If we set aside the 51% of California's water that isn't actually used by people, that 39% of total water becomes 79.6% of water used. So, yeah, 80% of usage.
These are solvable problems, so excluding that water from the ~40 million acre feet of water California uses every year seems like a convenient way to balloon the other uses. Plus as cited earlier, of the 39% of water use attributed to agriculture, 28% of it actually has multiple uses in addition to agriculture and is recycled (the 11% figure). So only 28% of the total is actually exclusively used for agriculture.
If it gets declared a disaster then Federal disaster relief will try to help. So 0% of the extra water brought in for disaster relief will go to farmers. They have insurance for that.
The 80% figure is farm use of water in the state.
This is completely false. The federal Central Valley Project that the article concerns is a major water delivery system that is key to much of the state.
(There are other federal roles beyond the CVP in California water supply—e.g., there is a federal role in Colorado River water management, but the CVP is the big, big federal involvement.)
> If it gets declared a disaster then Federal disaster relief will try to help. So 0% of the extra water brought in for disaster relief will go to farmers.
This has nothing to do with disaster relief. This is allocation of the water flow through the CVP, which is routine supply, not something that only kicks in in a disaster.
> The 80% figure is farm use of water in the state.
No, it's the ag share of non-environmental water use in the state.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/23/rain-califor...